We had Jaws. Now we have Jaws in Space. That’s right, Episode 8 of Guelph Movie Club is Alien. We’re stepping off the ship with Ripley to take our chances with facehuggers, chestbursters, and big, bad aliens.
You’ve been warned, but it won’t do you any good. You might as well join us on Thursday, August 29 at 9:00 p.m.
And right before Alien, at 8:00 p.m., you can also join us in the eBar for a special talk on why movies matter. Dr. Scott Duchesne of the University of Guelph will drop some knowledge on us and then answer your movie-related questions. Scott teaches in the School of English and Theatre Studies, where he specializes in the study of graphic novels and extra-theatrical performance. He has taught contemporary cinema for the past three years, focusing on the history, politics, and aesthetics of "blockbusters."
Scott will talk about how Alien is a transitional movie that both recalls the "new" Hollywood of the early-to-mid-1970s and anticipates the "blockbuster" decade of the 1980s. In the course of his talk he'll touch on both The Exorcist and Star Wars, and he'll also consider how Ridley Scott evolved as an artist right after the success of Alien by looking at Scott's masterpiece, Blade Runner, and his groundbreaking 1984 commercial for the Apple Macintosh.
It’s just another way we’re trying to make movie club bigger and better.
Before the movie starts, I’ll be announcing the winning movie for Episode 9, the September GMC (the short list for that should be ready for voting soon). And after the movie, you'll have a chance to nominate movies for Episode 10, so start thinking about what movie you’d like to see back on the big screen.
Don’t forget to visit the Bookshelf Facebook and Twitter pages for voting and more details!
Till then, see you at the movies.
- Danny W.
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Sorry if I just gave you a terrifying high school flashback but I thought, what with our screening Breakfast Club for Guelph Movie Club Episode 7, it just made sense. So mark your agendas: Thursday, July 25 at 9:00 p.m.
Before we get to that, please take out a Number 2 pencil and a blank sheet of paper. We’re having a pop quiz. Please choose one of the following movies as your selection for Guelph Movie Club Episode 8 (August). Be sure to show your work.
You can vote for your choice via this handy dandy GMC poll:
Voting ends Thursday, July 18, at midnight.
Time’s up. Pencil’s down. Don’t forget, it’s Breakfast Club on July 25 at 9:00 p.m.
Till then, see you at the movies.
- Danny W.
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We found out is that each one of us is a brain...and an athlete...and a basket case...a princess...and a movie club. And we’re all going back to high school. Episode 7 of Guelph Movie Club is The Breakfast Club. So come spend the evening with John Hughes, the man who defined what high school in the movies means.
You’ve all been sentenced to detention (in a really good way): Thursday, July 25, 9:00 p.m.
Before the movie starts, I’ll be announcing the winning movie for Episode 8, the August GMC (the short list for that should be ready for voting soon). And after the movie, you'll have a chance to nominate movies for Episode 9, so start thinking about what movie you’d like to see back on the big screen.
We’ve been working to add more to movie club evenings (because we love you that much). Stay tuned for more details.
Don’t forget to visit the Bookshelf Facebook and Twitter pages for voting and more details!
Till then, see you at the movies.
- Danny W.
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For thirty-eight years, that big, toothy jerk has been taking a bite out of anyone silly enough to get off the sand and into the ocean. Now's our chance for some payback, friends.
Tomorrow, when we show Jaws as part of Guelph Movie Club (9:00 p.m. at the Cinema; beachwear optional), you can have your chance to take some succulent revenge. For one night only, the Greenroom will be featuring fresh beer-battered Lake Erie pickerel with house-cut Yukon Gold fries, tartar sauce, and slaw. Sure, it's not a salt water fish, but we have to start somewhere.
If you're thinking of making it dinner and a movie tomorrow, this is a great reason to take the plunge.
In other news, the ebar will be offering a special drink in honour of Jaws—The Cape Cod (naturally): 2 oz vodka, fresh squeezed lime, and cranberry juice for $6.25.
We're trying to come up with more drink and dinner specials, as well as other ideas to make movie club nights special. We welcome your input.
So come out, see the movie, and enjoy some refreshments.
Until then, see you at the movies,
- Danny W.
Before Sunrise, the first film in Richard Linklater's series tracing a trans-Atlantic relationship, begins with a couple spatting on a train through the German countryside. It's the ruckus--the singing of the marital spheres?--that causes Jesse and Celine to meet eyes, roll those eyes, and split together for some quiet in the dining car. They're both in their early twenties, soft with baby fat; Jesse's American and aimless, Celine's French and returning from visiting her grandmother. What follows is the situation I think everyone of a certain age and singleness hopes for when they get on a plane or a bus or a train: Jessie has to fly back the next day and convinces Celine to detrain with him and spend the night in Vienna. They walk around the city together, casting and missing glances, and talking, talking, talking, and it's all romantic as hell.
Before Sunrise is very much of its time, loquacious and earnest, as interested in the offhand things we think as it is the offhand things we do. It follows self-taught director Richard Linklater's cult classic Dazed and Confused, but shares more in common with his first proper film, Slacker. That 1991 indie takes place over one summer day in Austin, Texas, and is a kind of human daisy chain about little more than walking and talking. Appearing around the same time as Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Slacker became something of a touchstone for the burgeoning overstimulated, underemployed generation. As a filmmaker, Linklater was one of the major players in the early 90s American DIY cinema wave, but has since gone on to have a fairly uneven career, matching his mainstream stinkers with thoughtful, interesting volleys. It should be pointed out that since those uneven years of the noughts Linklater's been chipping away at a single film, maybe titled Boyhood. The film's remarkable for the fact that it's filmed in real time, following a boy from birth to adolescence. His commercial stabs aside, Linklater has maintained a very genuine, vibrant curiosity with what film is and what it can do.
Sunrise's "sequel," Before Sunset came on the heels of the not-terrible Jack Black vehicle The School of Rock. Nine years later, Jesse has written a novel about that slacker night in Vienna. His book tour takes him to Paris, and his book brings Celine to the reading. Again, Jesse has a flight to catch, and again the two, now without their baby plumpness, stroll through a European city in real time, talking, talking, talking. And it's all almost romantic as hell.
Standing alone, Before Sunrise can seem a little saccharine--which is perfectly fine, I should add. I saw the movie in my early teens and was completely taken by--what was to me, at that time--the rare combination of romance and intelligence. Watching it now, it still strikes me as very honest and interesting. But in some ways Before Sunset contextualizes the saccharineness of the first movie. Those elements in the first movie that seem trite are also the elements of our youth that seem trite now in retrospect. In the nine years between movies, Jesse has gotten married and has a new baby, and Celine works in environmental law; Jesse has found a way to profit from his idealistic pontificating, whereas Celine has grown a bit more cynical, less trusting of the world--she's hasn't exactly lost her faith in romance or the possibility of the kind of happiness her night in 1994 with Jesse suggested, but she's becoming suspicious. Sunset is still a romantic movie, but it's different from the romance in Sunrise. Before, there was a possibility that romance was something you could do with your life; here it's something you do in defiance of life.
Now we have the third installment of Jesse and Celine's relationship. In nine more years, they've gotten married and, as far as I know, the question now is what happens when a relationship founded on movie-like romance has to live in the real world. I haven't seen the movie yet, but from reviews I've read, it should be interesting to think back to how Jesse and Celine first met. Rolling their eyes at the bickering married couple on the train, I can't help but imagine they both thought to themselves, "That will never be my life."
- Andrew
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I get ensorcelled by the terrible History Channel show Ancient Aliens. The program is a sort of a patchwork history lesson, though inhered with conspiracy theories that would have all human advancement nudged forward by extra-terrestrials. For me, the seller--apart from the zany ideas themselves--is the gobsmacked rhetoric of the interviewees. They go on as though aliens are the only sober explanation for any of our past's minutiae. The alien inveiglement is painfully obvious to them; the rest of us are kind of idiots for not seeing these little green truths. But, for all that certainty, the opinion of the show is not necessarily the opinion of its participants. To every supercilious claim is pinned the distancing qualifier "As some Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe."
Room 237: Being An Inquiry Into The Shining In Nine Parts has no such qualifier--it would be something like, "As some The Shining Conspiracy Wackos (TSCWs) believe," I suppose--so its endorsement of the parade of theories can be as grey as our possible progenitors. Does the movie believe that Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of the Stephen King novel is a veiled confession of the genius director's involvement in staging the moon landing, or a rumination on the holocaust of the European Jews or America Indians? Or is the movie a documentary about the people who hold those "truths" to be self-evident? Critical response to the movie (Essay, really.... Or anthology?) seems to teeter-totter on this ambiguity. I would hazard to say that Room 237 does not exactly believe in any of the theories it presents, but it is excited by them. One of the theorists, in describing a hidden pattern he had sussed out, describes Kubrick's insertion of that pattern being "possibly consciously." Much of 237 lives in, explores, and thrives in that by turns clunky and titillating realm of possibility. This apparently annoys the hell out of some people, but not me. This thing really blows my dress over my head. It's been a while since I've been this excited about a movie, for reasons of both content and presentation.
A great deal of the critical misconception I've read of 237 has to do, I think, with how the notions are presented. In Ancient Aliens, for instance, we have the talking heads, gesticulating insistently. (One particular talking head has on it a head of hair so vertiginous that it's earned its own Internet following.) Sometimes the very presence of the theorists discredits them, or at least tethers their claim. Director Rodney Ascher makes the subtle but stylistically interesting decision to not show his subjects. Instead, their voices are disembodied, expounding over relevant Shining footage or other found images, giving them an academic omniscience, a boost of authority; the movie is serving them, not the other way around. This technique also twists the tone of Ascher's film, giving it a surreal feeling at times, casting it more as a collage of ideas than a straightforward documentary. Ideally, one wouldn't have to be a fan of The Shining or conspiracy theories to dig the movie. Visually and structurally it stands on its own, and, in it's own way, punches the arm of what's become a fairly staid documentary structure.
The gaping lacunae of history provide incredibly spacey berths for those Ancient Astronaut Theorists to sashay their wide-hips through. The Shining Conspiracy Wackos, however, thrive on detail, specifically the wealth of meticulous touches Kubrick is notorious for. But it is that trove of detail in collusion with the ambiguity of its meaning that gives TSCWs some cogent-ish footholds. How could an eye as burnished as Kubrick's allow for continuity slips like a missing chair, a colour-changing typewriter, pattern-changing slacks?
In this clip, where Danny is beckoned to "Room No. 237" (notice that the only words you can make out of "room no" are "moon room?"), see how the gaudy geometrical pattern changes between when the ball is rolled to Danny and when he stands up. (Notice, too, that Danny's wearing an Apollo 11 sweater... outside the "moon room.")
Schematically, too, the Overlook Hotel is amorphous, having, for instance, windows where windows don't make sense, and hallways that rotate 180 degrees. These gaffs range from obvious to subtle, but it's difficult to accept that Kubrick let any of them slip. And if we accept that these mistakes are intentional, then what are the meanings and implications of those goofs? It's out of these fissures that the wacky, redolent flowers of Ascher's film grow.
But do any of these dogs hunt? One theorist is certain that, for one frame of the opening titles, just as Kubrick's name scrolls off screen, the director's face can be seen in the clouds. He makes a promise to--for his own documentary he's working on--Photoshop the hidden image, just to make it crystal clear. I've watched Room 237 more times than I'd like to admit and have found myself squinting like hell into that cloudful Colorado sky, finding bupkis. But this insistence makes for a convenient metaphor for the film itself. Can you really be wrong if you see what you see? The huntingest dog in the documentary/essay/anthology makes the case for The Shining as an open text--an "open text" being semiotic argument that validates a reader's response to a work over its creator's intentions. Whether or not Kubrick intended any of the readings arrived at in 237 is an exciting question, but we'll never know. It is fun, however, to imagine. But beware: there are plenty of unsubtle allusions to labyrinths within The Shining, and more than a few TSCWs describe how they've become somehow trapped inside Kubrick's film--one theorist even claims that his own life is beginning to resemble the plot. In this respect, Room 237 can get thrillingly Borgesian in its exploration of the metaphysical ways in which a place is actually created through one's conceiving of it.
- Andrew
P.S. If you see the movie and are at all interested in the unmitigated wackiness, I really suggest you check out a TSCW mentioned, but not featured, in the film, Mstrmnd. I maybe should have made clear just how intelligent the film's interviewees are: they apply an incredibly articulate logic to things they see as illogical. Mstrmnd, whether you believe them or not, is a hell of lot of fun to read. Here's a sample:
How do we decrypt The Shining? By reverse engineering it. By peering into its structure. Pulling apart aspects of its tools and forms that refer to one another, one can see roughly what Kubrick was aiming for. It's actually a pretty simple formula. The structure is largely false and it fools the audience, manufacturing a type of subliminal phenomena. And why would he do this? Again, it's simple. By making you think something is real while showing you it's fake, he gets to play with the idea of meaning in your unconscious. Where language begins, or is stored. Once neurophenomenologically decrypted, The Shining can be seen as a beginning to a new form of post-Western visual guidance. Perhaps even a new facet of language.
Guelph Movie Club Episode 6: Jaws (the one with the giant shark) is screening Thursday, June 27 at 9:00 p.m.
But before we get to the big catch, we’ve got another fish to fry: namely, choosing the movie that will become GMC Episode 7 (July). So get your voting fingers ready. The short list—just imagine me doing an imaginary drum roll here—is:
It looks like Episode 7 is going 80s—and it’s hard to argue with that. You can vote for the movie you'd like to see in June by taking this GMC poll:
Voting ends Thursday, June 20, at midnight.
So come on out to Jaws in June, but stay near shore. Till then, see you at the movies.
- Danny W.
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